Tijuana, circa 1980

A woman waits on the other side with her three teenage children. Her only son is seventeen, drives a car, and works in a factory somewhere around Los Angeles. Her two scrawny daughters are thirteen and eleven. They have been staying at a motel for several days and are almost out of money. The girls' passports and birth certificates have been "misplaced." They are lost. And they are waiting to be recovered, so they can go home.



(My maternal grandmother and uncle applied for citizenship maybe around 1980, when my aunt and my mother were in their teens. My grandmother had been living in East Los Angeles and cleaning houses on a work visa since she arrived in her early 20s.)

The Crossing of Narratives

My paternal grandfather crossed the Rio Grande with another young man he had met while working in some town in northern Mexico. He was only thirteen or so. He was working in a kitchen and sleeping in a shed behind the restaurant when the young man convinced my grandfather to make the journey across the river because the restaurant owner was taking advantage of them by paying them  very low wages for strenuous work. So the young man and the young boy went north. The young boy successfully swam across the Rio Grande, but the young man was swept away in the current and drowned.